Did you see John Howard on The 7.30 Report tonight?

07Aug

John Howard responded to the idea that people think he is a liar (or a “lying rodent” as a former member of his own party put it a few years ago). Howard jumped in on two issues: the WMD business and the entry of Australia as junior partner in the “Coalition of the Willing” back in 2003, and the “Children Overboard” affair. Brave man. He became quite feisty on this…

KERRY O’BRIEN: Now to your own problems, Mr Howard? I know that you’ve tried to reject the leaked findings of our own pollsters this week that you’re regarded as dishonest, but if that’s how people see you then that’s a real problem for you, isn’t it?

JOHN HOWARD: Well Kerry, I won’t be a commentator on that. I will deal directly with the issue. I’m not dishonest. There are many examples thrown up by my critics in relation to that but let me take one of the most egregious of all and that is weapons of mass destruction in relation to the war in Iraq.
I believe there were weapons of mass destruction because that’s what the intelligence said, so did Mr Rudd. He said it was an empirical fact and not based on available intelligence. So did Tony Blair and George Bush and Jacques Chirac and most members of the United Nations. To say that I lied to the Australian people on weapons of mass destruction simply because I stated a view based on intelligence and justified Australia’s involvement in the military operation based on that is not to say we took the country to war based on a lie. That is a lie that has been spread about me by my opponents ever since…

Well, let me go into the other quoted examples. Children overboard, I was in fact advised that children had been thrown overboard. I was not told at the time that that allegation was untrue and it was something I at least entertained a strong suspicion of right up until the 2001 election and in fact I released video at the time of the 2001 election knowing that as a result of that some people might believe that the original allegation was not correct…

On the other matter: “Between 2001 and 2004 I maintained the rage on Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policy here on Angelfire, but took the page down earlier this year. I was prompted to restore some of it in 2005 by the latest stories to emerge from Immigration, such as Cornelia Rau. Cornelia Rau proved to be the tip of the iceberg, with hundreds of cases of immigration injustice emerging since…” See that page here.

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